‘Thanks to those bloody marchers,’ Vincent said, ‘she never met you. You can go to her as a stranger. As a friend . . . It’s the opportunity of your professional career.’
He’d made it sound just about as nasty as he could. By way of an inoculation, I suppose.
When I finally arrived at the church on Coronation Square it was late in the day, and I was glad of my shabby anorak against the damp, gray evening. The jeans and duffle bag were mine, and the two old gardening sweaters from my days with Tracey, but the anorak had been Vincent’s idea. An assistant had borrowed it from the wardrobe mistress. She had them in all sizes and colors and stages of decay, and she’d made me sign for it in her little book.
I checked in at the church vestry — the vicar just waved me through and made a mark on a board — and followed arrows down an aisle to the main dormitory transept. The lights were already lit, yellow bulbs under tin shades on the end of long flexes, and I saw Katherine Mortenhoe almost at once. She was sitting on her bunk, isolated from the listless grumbling of the others by her trouble. As far as they were concerned, she might not have been there at all. This was no fringie commune — if you were in trouble here nobody knew you. Their troubles were their own. They fed them, and were fed by them. Otherwise you could be damn sure they wouldn’t be here. It was well known that Vicar Pemberton took in those whom none of the government agencies would have.
There were other women, but not even they took any notice of Katherine Mortenhoe. They sat bundled in layers of greatcoats, tying and untying the strings around their various paper parcels, busily not seeing Katherine Mortenhoe. Not seeing her trouble.
D.T.’s, you’d have said. Meths, surgical spirit, window cleaner . . . you name it, she’d been drinking it. She had the worst shakes anybody in that noble company of shakers had probably ever seen. So they kept away. Lived and let live. Died and let die.
I picked a bunk four away from hers, sat down, took off my boots. If I was angry with her, it was for playing a game with us and losing. If I was angry with myself, it was for letting my night in the police cell so get me down. I’d do far better if I left out all the guilt bit and got on with the job. I was a reporter. And there was always the chance that I might be able actually to help.
At least she wasn’t flailing and wailing. Her shakes were most discreet. I watched her in long shot. Nobody’d be surprised if I went over and spoke to her. Though I wasn’t dressed like her, wasn’t quite a fringie, we were obviously neither of us hard-core church property. Transients, more like, on the way from somewhere to somewhere. So nobody’d be surprised if we sort of teamed up . . . First though, I needed some establishing shots. Something for the opening sequence. And from what I could see of her around the goggles she didn’t look too miserable. Just caught in one of Dr Mason’s rigors, and waiting for it to go away. I even, methodical Katherine Mortenhoe, saw her glance at her watch.
I panned around the dormitory. Ex-army two-tier bunks, bentwood chairs, worn paving stones, people. People shambling in, people sitting around, people coughing and scratching and groaning. Such people. I was glad it wasn’t Tasmania. Beside this sort of social realism Tasmania was mere travelogue. The nave of the church was given over to eating and cooking arrangements. A sign pointed the way to Ablutions through a door behind the pulpit. While beyond the screen the sanctuary was dark and silent, a single red flame burning, a tiny spark of mystery in this most unmysterious of worlds . . .
A tiny spark of mystery — it was a good phrase, one I’d like to get back to Vincent. I made a note to dub it in later. I could hardly sit there on my bunk in the crowded dormitory and talk noble tellyese to nobody in particular. The ablutions, I hoped, would give me the privacy I needed.
Hot air blasted up through grilles in the floor, making the place smell of sweat and cheap dinners, and scorched dust. High above us the medieval vaulting had been painted and richly gilded in some last-stand moment of magnificence, but it was at the grilles that we warmed our hands and hearts. We kept our voices low also, in case echo should take them up and expose us to the indifferent stones . . .
I wasn’t watching Katherine Mortenhoe at the precise moment when she fell off her bunk, but the small noise she made and the chain reaction of short-lived silence that followed it immediately attracted my attention. Anyway, panning back to the bed and suddenly finding it empty was technically more interesting. I got up and went in my stockinged feet over to where she lay. Her rigor appeared to have eased. Evidently she was on to Day Two in Dr Mason’s guided tour.
Everybody was watching me. And listening. ‘We all go to hell in our own ways,’ I said. ‘But I think mine’s better.’
They were my first words to her ever. To her, ignoring the others. And if later she’d ever asked me to explain, I would have denied them. She had no right to explanations. She was a middle-aged woman, dirty, indescribably dressed, paralytic, dishonest, lying on the scrubbed paving of a down-and-out’s church dormitory. She was lying, in fact, on the memorial stone to one Suzann Pierce, beloved wife of Samuel Pierce, mother of Jonathan, Mary, Gathcart, Borden, and Sumner, born 1793, died 1867. So I stooped, and lifted her off the stone, and hoped she would never read it, and put her back on the bed.
‘I’ve had it before,’ she said. ‘It passes.’
‘I hope you’re right.’ It occurred to me that if she was going to pass as a wino she ought to smell of the stuff. ‘What are you using?’ I said. ‘Horse? Or just bennies?’
She stared at me. Clearly the idea of an alibi hadn’t entered her head. ‘Something of the sort,’ she said finally.
I sat down on the bed. It creaked unpleasantly beneath our combined weights. On it I noticed her handbag, the invaluable handbag. Without it we’d never have traced her. We should have known enough about her, but we didn’t. Discussing it, and bearing in mind the taxi driver’s information, we’d placed her in dark glasses and an expensive wig, somewhere sunny six hours’ flying time or so out of Amsterdam. After all, she had the money. The call from Vincent’s tail showed us just how little we knew about her.
‘Why not let me take off those goggles?’ I said.
Just leave me.’
‘Hell no.’ The viewers needed a proper look but I reckoned it could wait. ‘Where you from?’
She just stared.
‘Where you going?’
If there was a rule among our sort that these things weren’t asked, she didn’t know it. ‘Out of town,’ she said.
‘So am I.’
‘Not in my direction.’
‘The way you look you could do with company.’
‘No.’
I waited, but nothing else was coming so I got up and went back to my own bunk. If she wasn’t ready, she wasn’t ready. There was plenty of time. Instead I tried, for local color, to get into conversation with the man on the bunk overhead. ‘Not a bad old place,’ I offered in his general direction.
After a pause I offered it again. One idea at a time, not to strain him. He leaned down over the edge of his mattress.
‘A bloody fine lot you know about it. Greenhorn.’
So it showed. ‘Never too late to learn,’ I said.
‘Never said a truer word, mate.’
‘So teach me.’
He hesitated, then surprisingly produced my boots. ‘Lesson number one. Yer boots is yer best friend. Never let yer mince pies off of them.’
‘Thank you very much.’ I reached up for them.
‘Hoi, hoi . . . Thank you very much, he says.’ He dangled my boots higher. ‘These boots is going to cost yer.’
‘How much?’
‘A quid.’
‘Haven’t got it.’
‘Haven’t got it?’
‘You heard me.’
I had the rest of the night to spend in that dormitory. If I admitted to money I was sunk. I could have snatched the boots and pounded the old wreck to a pulp. Except that by now we had gathered an audience, and I doubted if they’d love me for it.<
br />
‘Haven’t got it?’
‘Would I be in this dump if I had that sort of money?’
‘Dump, he says. Not a bad old place, he says. Ought to make his bleeding mind up, I say.’
‘Five bob. And that’s tomorrow’s dinner.’
‘Five bob? Do me a favor.’
Against all common sense I was losing my temper. ‘Look, you’re an old man. I—’
‘And you—’ He leaned over farther, showing me the rusty blade of a surgical scalpel. ‘And you, sonny, are a naming nig-nog.’ There was laughter. He dropped the boots into my lap. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘have the flaming things. They was too big anyway. Thing is, you might of been from the Benefit. Get up to all sorts, they do.’
I put the boots on. They were missing their laces but the lesson was cheap at the price. Only the man from the Benefit would have argued. I punched the bulging mattress above my head. Not too hard. My mentor was delighted.
‘You watch it, mate. Just you watch it.’ He threw down the laces. ‘Lesson number two — never take the bottom bunk. Where’ll you be when I pisses me pit come morning?’
‘Same place as you, friend. Up shit creek without a paddle.’ There was more laughter. But the repartee wasn’t mine (I was too cautious that evening), it was Katherine Mortenhoe’s. Seemingly her paralysis went as quickly as it came. She was standing, leaning on the bunk support, her face inches away from the gent’s upstairs. He glared back. . ‘Fuck me,’ he said, ‘I do believe it’s a woman.’ ‘I wouldn’t fuck you, friend, not if the future of the human race depended on it.’
‘Think I’d trust my cock to your pox-shot old fanny?’ It was a new insight into the continuous, the only true Katherine Mortenhoe. She was, in this, her father’s daughter. Though why she had come to my assistance I couldn’t imagine . . . Anyway, I’d kept her in picture — Vincent could buzz out any of the words he didn’t like. I saw now that she had nothing left. She had come out with only just so much ammunition, and a shield only just so thick.
I stood up, and led her away, back to her bedspace. Jeers followed us. But the old man could be allowed his victory. They could all be allowed their victory. Mine was an entrance into the only true Katherine Mortenhoe. And hers. . . well, I didn’t suppose she really had one.
~ * ~
She’d thought him very kind, and — in this order — very sensitive, very intelligent, and very handsome. The beard did not hide his fine bone structure. He had a strange accent, not quite American, but pleasant all the same. And she’d sent him away because there was no room in what was left of her life for people, no, for men who were kind and sensitive and intelligent and handsome. And young. She’d made the correction out of honesty, as she lay on her back waiting for the paralysis to go away. Then a further honesty had corrected her yet again, and she had rescued him, and he had rescued her. She was forty-four, and dressed like a freak, and dying, and therefore safe. And her new freedom meant she could make friends of whom she chose. Could, in fact, make friends.
He said his name was Rod. She told him her name was Sarah — the American stepmother’s name had been Sarah, Saree. Surnames among their sort were obviously never used. Neither was the past. He admired her clothes, calling them klutzy, but without the scorn of the young woman in the container depot. She wished she knew more of the mores of the people she had joined. His group wasn’t quite her group -perhaps under different circumstances, with his really quite respectable jeans and sweater, they would have been sworn enemies. She was glad he accepted her. He was young and strong and confident, all the things she wasn’t. Tomorrow frightened her. He’d said he was leaving town. If he’d still have her, she’d tag along, just till they were out of Vincent’s watchful city.
At lights-out a single lamp was left burning yellowly high up under the vaulting. For late-comers, the vicar said, and she was grateful for it. Her day of doing-not-brooding was nearly over. She knew she would not sleep for a long time and she feared the darkness. In darkness brooding would be all that was left.
She lay and stared at the sagging mesh of the bunk above. She thought of the woman lying on it. Would she piss her pit, this woman for whom she should have had some fellow feeling but who was blankets tied with string, old beyond guessing, with poor swollen hands and a way of drinking her tea as if it were in that moment everything? Katherine could not begin to imagine the connections that made her move and stop moving, eat and stop eating.
She thought instead of Vicar Pemberton, made real in the walls about her. His hostel had been an obvious staging point. He had let her in without question, had accepted her just as he had accepted her unhappiness, that other woman’s unhappiness, over the telephone. Perhaps indeed he needed worries not his own. Though now that she had seen him, awkward, forcing himself, unprotected by the distancing device of the telephone, she thought not. He was driven by a larger need. In his vestry, above his table, a card: Come to me all ye that are heavily laden. At some time he had found out, or been found out. Now he was working to make it true.
She understood his connections very well. And felt sad for him. And slept.
Her very early morning rigor was becoming something of a habit. She woke, saw night and was irritated. After breakfast she had a long way to go, and she needed every bit of sleep she could get. She found she was sweating also. That was new. She glanced along the beds and was relieved to see that Rod too was sleepless, sitting propped up against the wall behind his bed. Then suddenly her eyes seemed to diverge, and there were two of him, and then a steady movement of the two of him from left to right that she couldn’t check. Dr Mason’s words rang in her ears: rigor, paralysis, sweating, coordination loss, double vision, incontinence, hallucination, progressive autonomic breakdown bringing on . . . Rather that than Lord of Upper Egypt.
She closed her eyes, hoping that the incontinence would at least wait until she was out of the hostel.
Then Rod was sitting on the bed beside her. She wondered why. ‘Did I make a noise?’ she said.
‘Not a sound. But I don’t sleep much. I saw you were awake, so—’
‘It’s not drugs.’ She wanted him to know that. ‘Just a thing I’ve got. A . . . sort of malaria.’ Malaria was an Aimee Paladine disease. It was tidy: you lay and shook, and then got bravely better.
‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘You’ll wake up the others.’
She got her hand out from under the bedclothes and reached for his. With her eyes shut it was easier, less of an admission. After a tiny hesitation he let her take his hand. She didn’t mind the hesitation — she was hardly appetizing — but she was glad he overcame it.
She held his hand for a long time. A picture of Harry came into her head, of his hand in hers as she sat beside him on a bed and he slept. Situations recurred, permutated, expressed endlessly the same few pathetic human needs. She wondered, without guilt, what hand if any Harry would now be holding. And, tired out, the figure three hundred thousand circling in her dreams, slept again.
In fact the hand Harry was holding had cost him rather less. It was stout and motherly, and Harry had sought it in anger. Anger that Katherine could make him the husband of a liar and a cheat, could make him ridiculous before a shopful of girls and then unworthy before the all-seeing Vincent. He had sought a pair of breasts not hers, and legs not hers between which he could exercise the skill that had been her special delight. When the skill had failed him he had been folded in such care and professional tenderness that his purpose had faded, and he had sighed, and found in the dark a hand, stout and motherly, that asked nothing he could not afford, and gave, in the dark, everything that he needed.
~ * ~
6
Sunday
When Katherine woke sunlight was streaming, crimson and blue, through the windows high above her bed. She instantly remembered the circumstances of her disturbed night and, squirming, was cheered to find that she hadn’t — such a charming phrase — pissed her pit. Next she looked for Rod. He was nowhere to be
seen. She didn’t blame him for leaving early, for going on wherever it was without her — now that it was morning she didn’t even mind. She could manage perfectly well on her own.
The noise that had wakened her was the voice of Vicar Pemberton, rising and falling in muddled echoes between the pillars and white marble monuments. Nobody in the dormitory stirred. She worked out that it must be Sunday morning, and that Vicar Pemberton must be praying. Her new freedom allowed her curiosity, so she sat up in bed, slipped on her goggles and sou’wester, and then padded barefoot along the transept in her quilted under-robe.
Drawn by his voice, she approached the screen. Beyond it she saw him, stooping and straightening, bending one by one over a line of three kneeling women and a very blonde little girl. She wondered what he was doing. Behind him thick white candles burned on the altar. It was all very holy, and she wished . . . Coming quickly to the end of his tiny congregation, the vicar turned away, faced the candles, and raised his voice, the words becoming louder but still confused against the surrounding ancient stonework. His getup, she thought, already a snob, was ever so klutzy.
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 17